(similar boat, use Heroku and some GCP in production for work) -- Heroku is great. But it is a bit limited and very expensive. It feels w/ modern cloud platforms you get something comparable with a little more flexibility for only a little more technical burden, _iff_ you have the chops. GCP / AWS are starting to encroach a bit w/ offerings like Cloud Run, I feel like they are one quality PM away from making a Heroku for Google type product that is a bit more powerful and a bit cheaper than Heroku.

Conversely, I also feel like Heroku could round out their offering just a bit more (ex: built in robust monitoring and alerting, better deploy notifications and healthchecks, a simple custom metrics system) and really lock in that "premium basic" tier that would be perfect for most small to medium businesses.

Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly.

There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth it.

Didn't mean to imply that was a widespread sentiment, of course! Just my personal one.